412 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [NOVEMBER 
angular hastate, and later developing forms that are made up of three 
pinne, the terminal one often very broad and hastate, as in the case 
of the earlier simple ones. 
On the sandstones and shales we find Asplenium pinnatifidum and 
A. montanum in great abundance. In similar formations, usually in 
dark shaded ravines and underneath broad shelving rocks, deep in 
the darkest recesses, Zrichomanes radicans grows in the greatest profu- 
sion. Nowhere within our experience in this country does the trop- 
ical character of fern vegetation manifest itself more strikingly than it 
does here under these dark and gloomy shelves where, in a minimum 
of light, beds of this filmy fern twenty feet long and two or three 
feet wide thrive in the slight but perpetual drip of the water that per- 
colates through the rocks. Not even in the swamps and sink-holes - 
of southern Florida, where the ferns of the tropics still persist in 
greater variety, is there so striking an impression of tropical lux- 
uriance and the peculiar clammy moisture that one expects in tropical 
vegetation. 
The rarest fern to find, however, even when you are near its station, 
is the elegant Zrichomanes Petersit. Within the section‘ that contains 
the type locality it took two days of very earnest search to find is 
From the description of the original station I had expected to find it 
“on rocks wet with the spray of waterfalls,’ but all such over moist local- 
ities yielded no returns. When I had almost given up the search I 
found it at last creeping under the roof of shelving rocks, sending ¥P 
at intervals of one or two centimeters its tiny fronds that look more 
like the leaves of a large Mnium than a fern; it occasionally forms 
matted masses of fronds like those distributed by Judge Pewee 
years ago, but it is distinctively a creeping plant. I learn from De 
Mohr that the plant is found at one or two other stations, but s0 far it 
_is not known outside of Alabama. Its minute size, however, and . 
unusual habitat would evade one not familiar with its habits, and it 
may have a wider distribution than I now suspect for it. But before 
these things will be known we need any number of people, call her 
botanists or what you may, who know plants, their haunts and eee 
who love the fields and woods and search them with the 2eal es 
prompted Peters and Beaumont and the other earlier botanists of Ala- 
bama to make known their native flora—Lucien M. UNDERWOOP 
Auburn, Ala., now of Columbia Oniversity. 
4T. 8. R. 9. Sect. 10, Winston county. - 
